


Half-Moon

by orphan_account



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-06
Updated: 2010-01-06
Packaged: 2017-10-05 21:08:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/46053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Angel takes Nina hunting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Half-Moon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [landrews](https://archiveofourown.org/users/landrews/gifts).



> Commissioned by LAndrews for fire_fic. Spoilers through Angel's S5 "Power Play" by implication. Thanks to Cofax for pointing me toward California wildlife resources, and for the beta.

Angel picked up the phone and started dialing that familiar number before he quite realized what he was doing. He was about to hang up when he heard Nina's voice on the other end: "Hello?"

"It's Angel," he said, immediately awkward and worried that she would be annoyed at him for calling at--good God, it was past 10 p.m. already. He hadn't realized he'd been trudging through paperwork for so long. "Would you--I was wondering if you might like to go for a drive."

"I'd love to," Nina said, much to Angel's surprise. "Where are we going?" A slight pause: "Should I dress up?"

Carefully, Angel didn't think about warm skin and pale hair and the rich lines of her body. "It's a surprise," he said. "Come as you are--" A glance out the windows showed a half-moon riding high in the sky behind a veil of shredded cirrus clouds. It gave him an idea: "Wear sneakers or hiking boots, something comfortable."

He wished he could smell her response over the phone. As it was, her voice sounded bright: "Sneakers, check."

"I'll see you in fifteen minutes?"

"Sure." She hesitated for a moment, then said, "Bye."

Angel contemplated the absence of mirrors in the elevator on his way down to the parking garage. Then he made his way out to the Plymouth GTX. "Hello," he said, patting the hood. He got in and turned the key, taking comfort in the engine's familiar purr.

Outside, the air was barely cool. Only a few stars were visible past the streetlights and neon signs. Traffic was low at this hour, and the smog was lighter than it might have been. Angel always noticed air, because humans took it for granted, and he couldn't; it was one more forever reminder of the fact that he wasn't human, no matter how much he might sometimes look like one.

Nina was waiting at the curb, wearing a light jacket and jeans and sneakers. "Hello," she called out. "New car?"

"Old one, actually," he said, absurdly pleased she had noticed.

"It's nice." Nina buckled herself in with care. She smelled of clay and salt and buffalo chicken and Sprite, and underneath it all, a nervous muskiness that he thought of as the wolf in her. "So, where are we going?"

"I thought we'd go hunting in the hills," Angel said. "I haven't been out there in ages, and it's a good night for it."

"Hunting?" she asked. Now she smelled a little alarmed. "That sounds dangerous."

He glanced over at her as he turned toward Foothill Freeway. "Not hunting with guns," he said. "The part of hunting that's the chase, not the kill." He was explaining this very badly. Nina needed to become more comfortable with her wolf. It was one thing for her to lock herself up at Wolfram &amp; Hart every full moon. It made her feel safe, and until she learned some form of reliable control, it was necessary. But cages, as Angel had learned, were never enough.

Once he had been the monster in the cage. A werewolf, at least, was not evil. There was hope for Nina.

Nina was quiet for a long time. He began to wonder if this had in fact been a very bad idea, if he had offended her terribly. After a while, she said, in a quiet voice, "It's not as bad as I thought it would be. I mean, it's only for a few days each month. But sometimes I catch myself doing things--wanting to order steak tartare when I'm out with my sister, or dreaming about rabbits."

He blinked. "Rabbits?"

Wistfully, she said, "They look so warm and furry and cute, and then I start to salivate. It's really terrible."

Angel decided not to ask her if she'd ever had Hasenpfeffer. "Carnivores have to eat, too," he said.

She lifted her hair out of her eyes and glanced over at him. "I forget sometimes that you're on a liquid diet, when you're not around. When you are--"

Angel looked straight ahead at the curving lines of the road, the signs and lights. No one who knew him well would be able to forget.

"--I can smell it." Nina sounded faintly embarrassed. "The blood."

Lightly, he said, "I do brush my teeth."

"Colgate," she said wisely.

Now he knew how Wesley must have felt about the "sex with a bleached blonde" comment, years ago. Never say there was no such thing as karma.

"And coffee," she added. "Does caffeine work on vampires?"

"It makes me jittery, but I like it anyway." He eased the Plymouth into the exit lane. In silence he took a long-memorized route, left here, right there, leaving the freeway's parade of lights behind them and curving off into the foothills.

"I like the air out here," Nina said, leaning back. "It's cleaner. Wilder." In the darkness, her eyes were unreadable.

Angel said, "I remember when cities smelled of horses and coal and open sewers. But the country--there were areas of the country where people didn't go, or vampires for that matter. I remember wild berries and moths and the way rocks look in the moonlight."

"I didn't know you were an outdoorsman."

"I wasn't, and I'm not," Angel said, thinking regretfully of the time shortly after leaving Darla when he had gone for a week without blood, any blood, and drove himself crazy staring at everything red: yew berries and maple leaves and those tiny flowers whose name he had never learned, anything red for a distraction. In retrospect he was surprised it had worked even that long. "Vampires aren't actually very good at living off the land."

Nina's pulse quickened. Angel hated himself for noticing it, but he was old enough to know the inevitability of his own reactions. Nina said, "I suppose super-strength and super-reflexes doesn't automatically make you better at tracking rabbits." She sounded wistful in spite of herself.

Angel made a note to himself to take her out to that nice restaurant that served braised rabbit. "They don't hurt. But the kinds of things good trackers know--where rabbits live and what they like to eat, the shapes of their tracks--that doesn't come with the package, no."

There was the part that he wasn't telling her, of course. Angel had tortured animals in his time, not that Nina had to know about that. But torturing animals had never really been satisfying. Animals were not capable of looking into your eyes and recognizing what you were, of understanding that you were something that should not exist, and existed anyway, and had come to cut them down.

One of these days Nina would look at him and understand, really understand, what kind of predator a vampire was: something that wore the faces and habits of its victims; something that liked cities, because prey gathered in cities, and humans were so good at getting lost in their own crowds. Rationally, he should want to delay that moment as long as possible. Nina's innocence was the only reason she didn't hate him.

Of course, he reminded himself, she had also torn out his stuffing during his interlude as a puppet. She wasn't that innocent.

Maybe he was still deceiving himself. But he would enjoy what they had while it lasted.

Angel pulled over to the side of the road. The mountains rose before them, dark against a darker sky. Angel got out and went around to the other side to hold the door open for Nina, but she had already opened it and was clambering out. She lifted her face to the moonlight as though she wanted to drink it. "Half a moon more," she said. "Is it bad that I look forward to visiting you at the full moon?"

Angel almost made the mistake of answering flippantly, then caught himself: that was real vulnerability in her voice. He needed to take her out more often. No, he needed to say something right now. "I don't think it's bad," he said. "But I look forward to seeing you anytime, you know."

"Except when you're saving the world." Now she was smiling. The moonlight caught on the corners of her mouth.

"Except," he agreed, trying not to think about the pile of paperwork he had left on his desk.

Once he had believed that saving the world was like a fairytale, with bright swords and battles in the dark and a golden girl who held the world's light in her hands. Now he knew better. He knew how easy it was to fall, even though it was something he should have learned a long time ago. He knew that world peace was a lie and family was betrayal and that there was no way to win the good fight.

The longer he could keep any of this from touching Nina, the better. When he was honest with himself, he had to admit that being with Nina helped him pretend that all was right with the world.

"Which way do we go?" Nina said, interrupting his thoughts.

"Follow me," he said.

They headed away from the road. The air was heavy with the earthy fragrance of sagebrush. Angel imagined that he could smell the lingering tang of ash from past fires.

Nina's stride changed the further they went into the hills. Angel didn't think she was conscious of it, but she placed her feet lightly, precisely, barely disturbing the foliage. He heard a slight movement ahead of them, and touched her arm. She stopped. "There," he said very softly into her ear. "Think that's a rabbit?" The creature's heartbeat was rapid in the way of small mammals.

The creature moved again, then froze amid a clump of flowers. Nina's fingers twitched. She approached the creature, but stumbled on a loose rock. The creature flicked its ears--it was, indeed, a rabbit, one of the ubiquitous desert cottontails--and bolted.

Nina laughed. "I don't know what I would have done with it if I caught it. It's not like I brought a knife to skin it with."

"Let's go look at its tracks," Angel said.

Near the flowers, they found the scuffed marks of the cottontail's feet. Nina had to stoop and squint to see them at all in the pale light. "I'm not used to looking at the ground this way," she said ruefully. "I mean, I notice dirt, because it makes me think of clay, and all the different textures you can get with it. But I'm not looking for the same things."

"Let's see if we can find another one," Angel said.

"Haven't we scared them off with our talking?"

"Well," he said, "we can stop talking and start walking."

She nodded and set off again. Angel was agonizingly aware of the passing time, measured in starlit seconds, measured in the steady rhythms of her heartbeat. They had plenty of hours before they had to turn back. He wondered if his constant awareness of the sun's nearness was anything like Nina's awareness of the moon's phases.

It took some time, but they located another cottontail. This time Nina was more careful in her approach. Angel stood back, watching her crouch down so she could see it more clearly. As he had hoped, Nina was at ease with herself, completely absorbed in her observations. Despite what had to be an uncomfortable position for human muscles, she looked relaxed.

"Boo!" she said suddenly. Angel almost jumped. The cottontail skittered away. Nina returned to his side, eyes dancing. "I couldn't resist."

"Still hungry?" he teased, thinking of his own thirst. The desire was always there, no matter how much he wished to deny it.

Nina pursed her lips. "I'm not," she said in surprise. "That's strange. I thought I'd be hungrier than ever. But there's something about watching something that's alive and looking back at you and wondering what you're up to. Not that I think I'd be able to resist if I were a wolf, because things are different then." Tentatively, she reached out and caught his hand. "Is that--is that a little what it's like for you? Not--not hunting, because you get to know people?"

Angel lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers one by one. "Yes," he said, even though it wasn't true in the ways she might expect. As Angelus he had been very good at getting to know people. Doyle had taught him that this skill wasn't always a bad thing and that it connected him to others. For a time he had hoped that this would be enough, and that he would be able to eke out his unending penance with the company of a few friends--

He tried not to remember how short human lives were. Cottontails lived, what, two or three years? Shorter, if owl or snake or hawk got them. And vampire, a vampire could live until the other side of forever. With each passing year, human lives seemed briefer and briefer. He didn't expect a werewolf's lifespan to be much longer.

Nina tilted her head. Against his better judgment, Angel kissed her, not deeply, but gently. The musk-smell of wolf was subdued. "Another time," he said, despite the temptation. "We don't want to scandalize your sister."

"Oh, Jill's asleep by now," Nina said, but didn't press the issue. Her hand stole into his. "Oh, God. Do you remember where we parked?"

Angel squeezed her hand. "Don't worry. I don't get lost easily."

In no hurry at all, they walked back to the car. Heartbeats, footprints, time passing and time gone. Silently, Angel said, _I will remember you even when you are dust and there are no wolves left._

The world's clock was ticking, and he meant to ring its midnight bell.

When they saw the car, a dark shape in the darkness, Nina yawned. "We should do this again sometime," she said.

"We should," Angel said. "I wish I could bring you in the daytime--"

"Don't," Nina said. "Don't say that. You can't help being what you are, and it was perfect."

She drowsed during the drive back to her house. Angel listened to the sound of her breathing, almost inaudible beneath the Plymouth's engine and the wind in his ears. For his part, he felt painfully awake.

"Thank you," she said as she got out. She yawned again. "Sorry."

"Don't be," he said. "Goodnight, Nina."

Angel wanted to paint the smile she gave him then, sleepy and sweet and a little quizzical, flirting with the I love you neither of them was ready to say. "Goodnight, Angel," she said.

Angel hummed to himself on the drive back to Wolfram &amp; Hart (he wouldn't think of it as home, not ever). Instead of heading to bed, he went back up to the office suite. The city's lights were bright and feral, another kind of wilderness entirely. He poured himself a mug of blood from the refrigerator and sat for a long time without drinking, thinking about prey and hunting and Nina's silhouette in the half-moon's light.


End file.
